


Night 2: Overthinking

by Helloootricksterr



Series: Lights For Eight Nights [2]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Candles, F/M, Fried food every night, Hanukkah, Jake and amy in love, Jewish Character, Jewish jake peralta, Judaism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 01:28:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16253843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helloootricksterr/pseuds/Helloootricksterr
Summary: Jake overthinks the holiday, luckily for him, his family loves him.





	Night 2: Overthinking

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this for a while and I hope to do eight chapters of this
> 
> I've gotten so much thanks for writing Jewish Jake and I want to read more Jewish Jake so I guess I'll write some.

Charles Boyle is a great man, and an amazing detective. His eye for detail is a great asset to the Nine-Nine. But sometimes Jake wishes that he didn't notice things quite so well.

He saw that Jake was a little more inside his own head than usual today. But instead of the usual keeping-a-cool-secret quiet this was a deeper, introspective quiet. 

Amy on the other hand was hard at work as usual, and absolutely zero (0) hair chewing or writing hard enough with a pen that she rips paper. So not a couple thing. 

Charles lasted two hours before making an inquiry.  
“Something happen?” He asks quietly, steaming coffee in hand. His friend jumps in his seat. Another sign of something wrong.

“What? Something happen? Me? No. pshh!” He loudly declares. Rosa looks up from her work, and Gina picks her eyes up from her phone. Luckily, the Sarge and Amy aren't here, Scully and Hitchcock are in the break room. The Captain is in his office, oblivious to the not-a-situation. 

“It's nothing.” Jake tried and fails to convince the others.

Charles knows better.  
“Oh it's something alright. What is it? Relationship problem? Food issue? Is everything alright with your parents?” 

“None of that! And none of your beeswax!” He waves an arm towards his desk and picks up the first paper this hand touches. 

“I'm doing work!” Brandishing the paper like a shield against Charles’s questions. The paper in question is held upside down, but reading upside down is a useful skill in police work. 

“Why do you have a printout about hanukkah?” He wonders aloud.

Jake’s cheeks quickly grow red at the question and he crushes the paper dramatically but very carefully keeps it in his hand.

“I don't know what you're talking about. Haha.” He very fake laughs as he leaves his seat to walk away from the bullpen and down a corridor. Probably to the evidence lockup. 

That was a confusing display, even for Jake. Charles looks to Gina and Rosa, both look as confused as he is. Gina blinks several times and a small grimace marks her face. 

“I got this.” She assures them with her usual cool-as-a-cat attitude. She smoothly made her way out of the bullpen and followed Jake’s path to the evidence lockup. 

She finds the man himself grumbling at boxes, blowing off internal steam. 

“Jake-n-bake, what's got those ants in your pants worked up?”

He jumps, not even hearing her enter the room, so lost in his head. His jump make him knock over two boxes of old evidence fall and spread their wares on the ground. With panicked movements Jake struggles to shove files and bags back in their boxes. Gina lowers herself to the floor and helps. After both boxes were once again holding their respective evidence did his shoulders relax from by his ears. 

They only moved down to mid-neck, Gina's job wasn't done yet. 

“It's been a while since you lit those candles, huh.” she knew she was right when those shoulders inched back up. 

“Yeah.” was the non-committal answer. He stands up and brushes fake dirt off his pants. 

Gina places her phone screen down on a nearby shelf and moves closer. 

“Do you wanna talk about it?” 

“Kinda? I don't know. I was fine last night.” He shrugs.

“The first candle?” He nods, still not looking her in the eyes.

“Did you have an issue last night?”

“No.” the curt reply was almost desperate. “Amy got me a t-rex menorah and a siddur and then we had doughnuts….” He trailed off, blinking. 

“So why am I so panicked right now?” he asks himself more than he asks Gina.

“Mmm.” She hums, noncommittal.

“Is it because I haven't done it since I lived with my mom? And now I'm doing it with a serious girlfriend?” He isn't even taking to Gina at this point. He turns and starts to pace in the small space available.

“Mmm” Gina hums again and watches him pass.

“Or is it because we compromised on both Christmas and Hanukkah to the point where I'm comfortable doing both and not one or the other??” The more he thinks about it, the faster he paces.

“Uh.” 

“Or the fact that I haven't touched this Jewish part of me in years and I'm uncomfortable embracing it?” Jake exclaims and turns to his friend. 

“Maybe all of that?” Gina suggests lightly.  
“Or.” She said a little firmer as Jake keeps pacing.

“You could just be over thinking it.”  
That stops him in his tracks as he turns to face her.

“Whadaya mean?”

“You could just be over thinking this. There could be no reason to get all hot ‘n bothered about this other than the fact that you want there to be you you walk there back and forth psychoanalyzing yourself to try to make a reason for the panic!”

He flinches away from her harsh words and she takes her tone down a few notches back in to soothing mode.

“You're you, with your own ways of doing things. Changing one doesn't need to be the biggest deal. It just sounds to me like you're worried about that up here.” She taps his forehead. 

He blinks.

“Maybe it is something to get worked up about, but your girlfriend loves you, and wants you to be happy. If you don't want to do it anymore, tell her.”

“I wanna keep doing it though.” He sounds a little defeated.

“So keep doing it. It ain't hurting nobody,” With that said, Jake smiles. It's small, but real. 

“Thanks Gina.”

“No problem. Next time you have a freak out about religion, text me. Or bring cronuts for an in person job. I charge more that five cents for psych help.”

“You got it. Just give me a minute to come back.” 

“Sure.” she easily agrees, taking her phone and leaves the storage room. 

She take a seat at her desk and sets a mental timer for a few minutes to text him if he doesn't come out. 

But Detective Peralta does come back to his desk within three minutes. He looks like he washed his face. Jake pulls the crumpled paper out of his pocket and tries to smooth it out. 

He takes in a deep breath through his nose and lets it out slowly though his mouth in an attempt to calm himself. 

He makes his way to his best friends desk with an apology on his lips.

“I'm sorry for being weird before, I'm still a little conflicted about doing this.” He passed Charles the crumpled paper.

The name of the article was: “How to Celebrate Hanukkah for Dummies”.

“Oh Jake, I'm sorry if I made you feel bad about this.”

“No, it's my fault for being weird about it.”

“Is today the first day?” Boyle wondered.

“Technically. Yeah. I mean, it started last night so today is the first day. I think.” Still a little unsure, and still obviously very uncomfortable. But actually admitting his issue was a big step from the person he was just a few short years earlier.

“Aaaanyway I'll get back to my work, keeping the people of Brooklyn safe from crime and whatnot.” Jake ended the conversation, moving backwards to his desk.

“Yeah, you do that.” Charles answered, thinking of a potato latke recipe he had in a cookbook. They taste best fresh, he remembers. With applesauce or sour cream. Doesn't he have some homemade applesauce left in the pantry?

Later, when Jake is no longer in earshot, Rosa leans a hip against Gina’s desk. 

“There's a story behind what happened before that I don't know.” She states, wondering how hard she'll have to push to get an answer. But she doesn't need to. Gina knows Jake loves Rosa. 

“Jakey’s celebrating Hannukah for the first time in years and it's bringing up some stuff that's been buried for a while.Expect another weird-out or two within the week.”

Rosa accepts that with a simple “Huh.” and goes back to her desk. Wasn't Hanukkah about eight days of gifts or something? After a moment of self questioning that admittedly went nowhere, she gave in and went to Google. 

 

Outside the precinct, one chai tea in hand, Amy admits that she wants the 99 to do something for the holiday, but not in a will-make-a-big-deal-and-spook-Jake-way. 

She has a feeling that if forced to embrace the holiday, Jake might give it up altogether.

She bounces an idea or five off of Terry and he nods. 

“Maybe we can start gently by finding an electric menorah for a window. And I'm pretty sure I saw something about a party for the holiday in the 86 for all the Brooklyn precincts. From the sign up list I saw it's mostly bureaucrats, but there are a few beat-cops too.” 

“A party? When is it?” 

“Uh, let me double check.” He answers, scrolling through his email. 

“It's on Thursday! There's dinner and candle lighting and a dj… I'll admit I don't know how to pronounce that name.” The phone gets passed to smaller hands. 

“Um, I think it's pronounced Zih-she. I could be wrong.”

Okay. Thursday. She had two and a half days to get Jake to warm up to the idea. 

This could work. 

“Santiago, when you go shopping for decorations for this place, find me some of those 3-d folded paper ones. I like those.”

She nods and smiles. Jake likes those too. They have two hanging from the ceiling in their apartment. 

Later that night, over pizza, fries, (which Jake points out are a holiday food because they are deliciously fried in oil.) and salad, they talk about their days. Jake tells Amy that he told Charles and Gina that he's celebrating but keeping it low key. 

Amy is glad that she made Jeffords swear not to tell anyone she told him. 

Soon it's time to light the candles. Amy wonders if she should take off the wax that melted down the side of the t-rex from last night. Jake assures he that she doesn't need to. 

“Besides, more will probably drip down from the rest of the candles and it'll be different colors and look cool. And.” Here he hesitates for two moments. “It shows that it's being used. I guess, I don't know.” He mumbles at the end.

He melts the bottom of two candles to stay in their holders. Tonight a red and a green candle proudly stand at the tail. Jake gets kitchen scissors to cut the wicks down so the candles will last longer.(Even though it's not like the tiny candles are expected to last more than an hour) (( but the research she did DID say that the candles are supposed to last for more than half an hour, and these specially made for the holiday did the trick) Amy gets a piece of tin foil to put under the menorah so that the wax doesn't get on the windowsill. 

Looking out of their apartment window, Amy spies a few small lights in windows of the building both closest to hers and across the street.

She was half expecting it. They do live in Brooklyn, after all. 

Earlier today Jeffords had found an old but working electric menorah in the holiday storage and promised to set it up after Jake left. 

As long as they both had been there, Amy doesn't remember ever seeing it up, so Sarge will lie about being the one to do it. 

Jake flips through the siddur to find the page he used last night, but this time his eyes see what he was too stressed to notice last night. 

“Uh, oops.”

“What?”

“I-um. I didn't follow the instructions yesterday. There are 3 blessings for the first night, not two. And I forgot it. I didn't read the instructions because I thought there were only two.” He turns the thin page to reveal blessing number three that he didn't remember.

He can feel his cheeks grow red with embarrassment and shame. Gentle hands wrap around his chest and hold him from behind. He puts a hand over hers, and they stay silent for a bit, just sharing the closeness. 

Jake spies the candles in the windows across the street, and watches as two new lights get added. Reminding him that he was staring out the window for a reason. 

He takes in a deep breath, hold it for a few counts and let's it out. 

“Even though I made a mistake, it doesn't mean that I'm kicked out of the religion.” He jokes, trying to make light of the situation. Amy let's him. 

She lets him go and he lights the candle. He sings the blessings the same way as the night before, albeit with a little more familiarity. 

He turns off the light and they watch the candles again from the couch. 

And maybe they make out a bit by the candlelight. 

It's nobody's business but theirs.

**Author's Note:**

> But then totally do make out a bunch tho.  
> ;)


End file.
